Rios, cidades e chafarizes: o governo das águas em Goiás - das fontes públicas à rede subterrânea de abastecimento

Abstract

The assignment aims to analyse and discuss the different uses of water in the City of Goiás, as well as its appropriation, domestication, and submission to the interests of the population of the city, observing, mainly, the public supply since the emergence of the settlement, in the 18th century, until the middle of the 20th century. To this end, we sought to understand the processes of domestication and use of water by human societies, from direct access to rivers and wells, through founts and fountains, to underground pipelines, as well as their history in Brazil, from Portuguese America to the imperial and republican periods. The construction of water supply networks in modern western cities integrates broader processes of health intervention by public authorities in urban spaces, the genesis of which can be found in dominant initiatives in Europe and the United States, privileging water distribution systems to homes through of pipes in the form of underground networks. In the second half of the 19th century, this model would be welcomed in Brazil, when the decline in the use of fountains and spouts as mechanisms for free distribution would give way to the networks and pipes that would carry water from reservoirs to urban buildings. The research found that, in Goiás, the management of water resources in the colonial period had a mining-oriented nature, which made domestic water supply a second priority, especially in the villages where gold was mined. Thus, in Vila Boa, then capital of the captaincy of Goiás, the effective management of the water supply by the local authorities was only inaugurated five decades after the beginning of the occupation of the territory, with the construction of the first fountain in 1772. The demand for water motivated the construction of more founts and fountains in the following centuries, defining the distribution model until the middle of the 20th century, when a new domestic distribution strategy, based on the installation of underground piping, transported the water from the springs and reservoirs to the buildings of City. Associated with the modernization processes of the urban communities of the cerrado, the late implementation of a new system for capturing and distributing water in the City of Goiás would occur in parallel with the loss of the secular condition of capital, transferred to Goiânia, an artificially built city. In this process, the strategies of the municipal public management for the consolidation of this project will be described until the inauguration of the water channeling work, in 1949. However, the reduced availability of resources and the difficulties inherent to the implementation of the system conditioned the offer of the service to a limited region of the city. The following years will be one of strife over expanding access to water. As not everyone was able to immediately enjoy the public service of piped water, as a historical heritage from the colonial and imperial periods, the persistent use of founts and fountains continued for some time, without an immediate break between the two distribution models. During the 1950s, this dichotomous supply model still persisted in the old capital: a free public system and a private and domestic model of water use.